What an awesome and important book for this modern age! Definitely a must-read for current and future generations, regardless if you’re in the tech field or not!

Firstly, what I love best about this book is that it is a way to learn about how algorithms and code is used in the real-world, but it doesn’t try to teach it to you on a technical level. (Shoutout to my childhood best friend who read this book with me for our little book club!) I add that also because that is precisely why this book is awesome. It doesn’t matter your technical level of understanding, anyone can enjoy and learn from the examples and questions Fry explores in this book.

The table of contents lists the chapters as follows: Power, Data, Justice, Medicine, Cars, Crime, and Art. Each chapter describes specific real events that have occurred in each of those fields in regards to code and algorithms. Some key phrases I learned about were: machine learning, Burgess’s Method, random forests, neural networks, and Bayes’ Theorem. I don’t know how long it would have taken for me to reach the specifics of those topics in my own technical studies, but I’m very happy to have read about them and how they are applied to the real-life situations that have already occurred.

Let’s talk about the Cars chapter.

A couple of months ago, me, my husband, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law were sitting outside underneath the gazebo, talking about self-driving cars. My husband is a technological virtuoso and already had an understanding of how self-driving cars worked. I did not at the time, and neither did the rest of us.

However, my in-laws were both excited about the future prospect of self-driving cars. Fry mentions early on in her book the misconceptions people have when it comes to technology, and how most people tend to over-estimate the capacity of algorithms. This is true when it comes to the topic of self-driving cars because of the amount of people who are willing to put their lives in the hands of a self-driving car. Before reading Hello World, I was on the fence about my stance on self-driving cars. Now, I feel confident that I would much rather be in control of my own vehicle, and I’ll be sure to pass on that lesson onto my daughter (dramatically, of course, as if we were in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie).

From the start, my husband was against self-driving cars. But I should have seen that coming since my husband finds an automatic transmission as already too much interference (ha!). Point blank, he said: he did not trust a computer to make life-saving decisions. Back then, I greatly underestimated my own driving capabilities while over-estimating the accuracy of our current algorithms.

Without diving too much into the specifics, anyone who is interested in the idea of self-driving cars should read this book.

The Air France Crash of 1983 specifics are haunting enough to warn me that maintaining skills that involve our lives are mandatory as we advance with technology.

One of the largest take-aways I have from this book is that as humans advance, we need to make sure Wall-E doesn’t become a reality, to put it plainly. Essentially, we cannot let automation equal future generations loosing necessary skills, and thus begin a regression in the human species by relinquishing power over to algorithms and machines.

We need to remember that the smartest computer in the world is still the human brain.

Cue segue.

Let’s talk about the Art chapter.

Towards the end of the book, I could feel the fire in Fry’s writing, with impactful moments that definitely earned a mic drop.

One thing we have to remember about our humanness is our ability to feel. Our ability to feel, possess, and express emotions. A machine cannot contain emotions or feel them. A machine can mimic the expression of emotions through various tactics but it cannot feel. And that is what makes us human, and we need to remember that there is high value in the unquantifiable aspects of our humanness. This is why art is important, and why the creation of art can be mimicked by machines but it won’t (in my opinion) contain the same magical aspect that comes from art by a human. The art chapter and the way Hannah Fry explores this topic was definitely one of my favorite moments of the book!

I’m extremely happy to have read this book at this stage in my learning journey! My knowledge has been greatly broadened and now I feel as if I have a great starting point for further research into how code can and should be applied to our lives in the future.

In my opinion, more books like this need to be written as technology continues. By the time my toddler is in her teenage years, I’d want her to read something like this so she could understand the world she lived in, and how to progress in the future with technology as a smart assistant, not a catalyst for human regression.